Dorianne Laux
Life on Earth
W.W. Norton & Company, 2024
Reviewer: Lee Rossi
With Life on Earth, her seventh full-length volume of poetry, Dorianne Laux offers again her truest poetic self. Throughout her career she has been consistently provocative and consistently enjoyable, sharing with her readers her enthusiasm for life and language. This book continues her string of hits.
Life on Earth, in fact, is a like a visit with an older and wiser friend, a friend conscious of the shadows of autumn, whom we seek out because of her depth of insight and experience. Time and again we hear in this volume Time’s wingéd chariot. This is a book of odes, praise is the medium of choice, praise tinged with sadness and foreboding, but praise nonetheless. Life is the great gift, a gift that comes from the mother, all the mothers enduring struggle and pain so that their children might be born, so that, as Laux says in “Spirit Level,” “the breeze I would be could blow through.” Life is gift, even in the midst of death and destruction; contemplating the remains of Pompeii, “the excavated people of Pompeii, frozen in time,” she encounters a family—“father propped / in what looks like an easy chair, / a mother bouncing a child / on her lap, as if they’d decided / in the final moments to be happy, to go into the afterlife / covered in ash, buried alive / by joy.” (“Thermopolium”)
Happiness and contentment are always possible, says the poet, because even in the most dire circumstances, we have the choice of accepting or rejecting those circumstances. As she tells us (echoing Hopkins) in “Psalm,” even when “the earth is locked in irons of ice and snow / there are angels in the undergrowth, praise them.”
In fact, the world is filled with “the dearest freshness deep down things,” and Laux goes out of her way to identify some of the more out-of-the-way goodies which we may have overlooked. Cajuns (from whom she is descended) get a nod, as does French toast; the equinox; her neighbor as he watches porn; standing naked on her porch at midnight, her “pocked and lunar thighs” on display; falling asleep to Ancient Aliens (the TV show); reading poetry she doesn’t care for; or visiting the Smash Shack in Jacksonville, NC, where you can unleash your frustration destroying “plates, bottles, windowpanes, crockery, mayonnaise / jars,” anything made of ceramic or glass. As much as the charm of her examples, the energy of her syntax impresses us with her commitment to the world: hers is the syntax of optimism, endlessly, hopefully stringing phrases, building compound, complicated sentences, the goal being to encompass the whole universe.
In the title poem she tells us, deflatingly, defiantly: “The odds are we should never have been born.” And yet here we are, “a being made of water and blood, a creature with eyeballs and limbs that end in fists.” eyes and limbs made to explore the almost endless bounty of this world. Eventually we will die. Isn’t that our First Lesson in Syllogism: all men (and women) are mortal. Or as Fr. Hopkins tells us: “It is the blight that man was born for …” (you can finish that mournful couplet yourself). But Laux’s is a rosier temperament re-casting the good Father’s words to her own purpose: “When you think you might be through with the body and soul, look down at an anthill or up at the stars, remember … the bounty of good luck you were born for.”
So many good things, but she reserves special praise—and who can blame her—for musicians and poets. Take a look at “Garage Band” (“Each song a pearl threaded onto a necklace / I have worn all my life.”) or “Mugged by Poetry,” in which she describes falling in love with poets she doesn’t really care for. Or what about “The Smallest Park in America,” which, interestingly, can only accommodate five people, “enough warm bodies / for most poetry readings,” and where,
… There
is always a vase of just-cut
flowers dying in a narrow
vase set upon a skinny, wobbly
lectern, a squat glass of water
some poets replace with vodka.
Not the grandest setting for a cultural event, perhaps, but just right for an art which, to its credit, celebrates the marginal and neglected. The reading ended, the members of the audience “stand for a moment / under the stars, remembering / what it was like to be held / gently in a lion’s open mouth.” Notice the lyric inflation—the stars, the being held—and then the drop, as we return to the reality of living in the lion’s mouth. Gentleness, strength and irony—hallmarks of Laux’s poetry and persona.
We live in an age of anxiety and desperation, we are encouraged by our leaders and our media to be restless and resistant. But is that what we want from a poet near the climax of her career? Wouldn’t we rather have peace and acceptance? I leave it to my readers to make their own choice. As for me, I’ll take all the peace and acceptance I can find. It’s not quite truth and beauty perhaps, but what the twenty-three year-old Keats wrote applies in this context as well—“that’s all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
